Fertility, Intelligence And Religion

The perennial underground subject of the nexus where fertility, IQ, education and religion meet gets another go-round on the avant-garde right. You can read a couple of takes here and here. Bottom (literally) line: dysgenics is real, and it’s happening right now.

I have a thought on the issue that I haven’t seen addressed in any of these discussions. Perhaps smarts and dislike of, or cold indifference to, children are intertwined at the genetic level? Hypothesis: The genes that code for smarts also contribute a suite of personality alterations that result in reduced enthusiasm to have kids.

Maybe instead of all these calculated, or emergent, trade-offs accounting for lower fertility among the SWPL class — e.g. more schooling leading to more lost prime fertility years among women — the real reason for the dysgenic trend is that smart people just don’t get as much enjoyment out of kids as dumber people do. As a result, they use the contraceptive tech and cultural memes at their disposal to actively avoid the burden of children, especially when they are younger and the world is full of delights.

Maybe this, too, would explain why there are natural evolutionary limits on selection for high IQ. In small-ish numbers, high IQ confers a group benefit, but in larger numbers high IQ becomes fitness-reducing, if by fitness we restrict ourselves to the gene’s eye view of getting more copies of itself into future generations.

Anyhow, not a sermon, just a thought. My time around smart people, and my observations of their discomfort and/or boredom when in the company of children (particularly the men) leads me to believe they don’t really have a strong internal motivator pushing them in the direction of reproduction. Pushing them in the direction of sex, yes. But thanks to rubbers, the pill, and destigmatization, they are able to thwart the end goal of their genetic programming.

Sort of on this topic, check out this article. Be warned, it is long. She starts of by realizing that the feminist BS “you can have it all” is not true. But, instead of following on that path of enlightenment, she comes to the conclusion that the culprit is the “corporate environment being unfair to women”. Her final conclusion is that there is need for more women in government and a woman president to fix the problem. LOL Unbelievable what the feminist mind does to someone.

We would have wanted to reproduce if the culture hadn’t put laws in place that warned smart men that it might be best to avoid kids. More specifically, during the Reagan years, we whites were trained by the pundits on the right to hate the ghetto alphas who were getting all the black teen girls pregnant. We were told that they were irresponsible, which translated into us thinking that we were responsible by avoiding getting women pregnant. It was actually quite stupid of us that we listened to the right wing pundits on this point.

We were trained to want the laws that clamped down on those ghetto black men. We didn’t realize that they would clamp down on us even worse should we get a woman pregnant. After the fact, we were smart enough to realize when the harsher child support laws came into effect that getting women pregnant was financial suicide for us.

We did this to ourselves by listening to and voting for the evangelical right which aligned with the feminist left on the issue of child support. Reagan was no small government hero to say the least. With his presidency, the evangelicals took over the GOP.

Anyway, there should definitely be no income-based child support mandates in the place where a man lives. If it came to a reasonable $300 per month for men whose partner insists on not letting him or his parents have the baby, then smart men wouldn’t worry so much about getting women pregnant.

Any other type of government policy will promote only dumber men having kids.

Luckier there are societies where having a kid won’t cost a man a lot of money. American men should all make sure that international child support agreements aren’t made like the one between California and Mexico that states that the woman in the poorer region can demand and get the exact child support amount if she were residing in the richer region.

And the invention of DNA testing in 1991 badly hurt the ability of alphas to get women pregnant where they and the women would have been formerly comfortable that the woman’s beta husband would accept and raise the child as his. I believe a lot of married women stopped trying to get impregnated by alphas after DNA testing become normal.

At the risk of going all singularity on you, if life-extension technology is developed, but is not evenly distrubuted (i.e., only the wealthy and intelligent get it at first), it could be an interesting demographic race between the longer-lived but less fecund, and the shorter-live but more fecund.

” New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans… Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, the researchers said, but affluent people have experienced greater gains, and this, in turn, has caused a widening gap.”

I don’t know…the type of “smart” person who flocks to DC is different from smart people elsewhere. Sure sure, high IQ causes approach anxiety leading to less approaches, less sex, less kids but a homogeneous society will lead to the proper beta-male reward paradigm (serendipitous typo, almost wrote paradise) where smart guys get wives too. The smart SWPL set have been programmed to hate tehir biology, only to oh-so-crave children once it’s too late. There is another smart problem of conscientiousness in which we don’t get pregnant by accident because we’ve been told that having kids ruins our lives. As for enjoyment, look to what rich bitches do, they collect those things, once they accept the stretch marks.

Smart irreligious people, where sex is severed from reproduction, have fewer kids because they are better disciplined and artificially detached from the animal instincts that motivate the dumb. Religiosity dignifies and disciplines animal instincts by uniting them to a purpose greater than an individual’s self-interest.

Intelligence is correlated with wickedness because it’s hard for the relatively gifted to humble themselves. The smarter you are, the more challenging it is to keep perspective. Along the smart person’s progression, it is too tempting to stall out at the know-it-all stage, before reality forces the most intelligent perspective of all: that, all things considered, you are a finite, mortal worm with relatively small advantages over the typical man and severe limitations on your capacities, despite your immature dreams and self-esteem puffery courtesy of mom and the culture. Wisdom is hard-earned, so we retain the idea that there is no utility to naïveté. We spent so much youthful energy growing out of our innocence, what fool would want to return there! So humility seems like folly to the boastful “smart.” True wisdom begins in the childish Socratic dictum, “All I know is I know nothing.”

you remind me of my husband, a smart guy who as a result perceives the general truth that everything sucks (a philosophical stance). in his case, that realization is only relieved by gallows humor. but i sense it’s not in yours.

somewhere in your recent comments you give the impression of being a never married 30ish guy. i could be wrong. a word of advice, the same i gave to maya: find a decent woman, perhaps a nerdy bookish one (our numbers are legion) who will appreciate your intellect, and-this is important-is able to engage it. i don’t mean any disrespect. please know that i put your name in the ‘find’ function in order not to overlook any of your comments, even if i leave all the others unread.

related to heartiste’s theory is that this awareness of how miserable life really is for many that the brighter have may depress their fecundity. how dare you bring a life into the world not knowing what the future holds for them! i doubt this thought occurs to those of sub-par smarts. didn’t apply to my husband but i guess he’s an outlier.

I appreciate your criticism. You are reading too much of your husband into me, which is understandable.

I do not “perceive … that everything sucks.” Quite the opposite. The astonishing fact that I wake up each morning and draw breath is enough to sustain the theological virtue of hope (spes) through anything, including mortality itself. And if that weren’t enough, I am conscious that I was born in the very best place with the best possible family and upbringing and education — albeit at perhaps in a difficult era (“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite…”). I am not morose or despairing or dyspeptic or spiteful, all qualities which, incidentally, this little subculture could stand less of.

I have found all manner of “decent” women, plenty of “nerdy bookish one[s] who appreciate my intellect,” but none “able to engage it.” I know of no women with that capacity, have never heard a hint of a rumor of a woman with that capacity, and frankly cannot imagine her without hiding a dick under her skirt: true women are built for different strengths, and the attempt to become an equal intellectual partner to a man is an attempt at unsexing oneself. But don’t misunderstand, it’s not exclusively a woman thing: few men can engage either. As I mentioned elsewhere recently, those with the potential to “engage” almost always possess the concomitant handicap of debilitating arrogance — a lack of necessary humility that sours hope into despair (save a handful of priests and professors I’ve known).

I have made peace with this lack of intellectual complementarity, as the smartest men and women do. Most in our culture regard it as my simple misogyny and/or delusional self-regard, but that’s not it at all. I will leave my record and my testimony to speak for the worthiness of my esteem, and frankly the attempt to prove it bores me by now. But the misogyny? I love women precisely for what they are, and what they are does not include equality at this level. When it comes down to it, the feminist propaganda notwithstanding, those women and I are fine with this arrangement: girls don’t try to pull intellectual rank between the sheets (boner killer). At first the ones with moxie — as you appear to have — struggle to prove themselves worthy and equal, but the honest ones eventually submit: As Ilsa climactically exclaimed to Rick, in the sexiest confession in all of cinema, “Oh, I don’t know what’s right any longer! You have to think for both of us. For all of us.” Can do. I do do. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

This world doesn’t need more smart women. In fact it would do quite well without them whatsoever, just as it does well without dogs walking on hind legs. What this world needs is devoted and faithful and trustworthy women — innocence, naïveté, even dumbness actually help encourage that fidelity. There is nothing so tranformatively beautiful as those faithful qualities, particularly when they are naturally occurring in a girl. Men on this board will fail to relate, but the most gorgeous women I’ve ever seen are those in solemn repose and submission, a phenomenon you see all the time in worship but almost never in the general culture.

Finally, the idiocracy theory of fertility is a half-truth designed to make the marginally smarter believe they are elite. As the original post above professes, intelligence is not the controlling factor so much as religiosity. And as I say above, this error of relative worth is the arrogance that debilitates. The idiocracy theory caters to just those idiots who aren’t as smart as they dream they are — it gives them an excuse to “depress their fecundity” by declaring their contracepted drybox to be emblematic of their elite status. Yes, those who subscribe to the idiocracy creed may be smarter than some trailer court denizen, but they are not at the highest ranks.

it’s a shame you haven’t had any luck finding a woman who can engage you. i’d offer my smart as a whip daughter (comes with her own wardrobe!), who just told me how exasperated she is with her boyfriend’s knuckle-dragger buddies who can only talk about the quality of the dope they’re smoking. she probably couldn’t keep up with you anyway, but at least she wouldn’t bore you. heh

‘This world doesn’t need more smart women. In fact it would do quite well without them whatsoever, just as it does well without dogs walking on hind legs’

try to think of it from a woman’s perspective. when age sexually neutralizes her, other qualities assume a lot more importance to her. she can’t play the flirtation game anymore.

‘What this world needs is devoted and faithful and trustworthy women — innocence, naïveté, even dumbness actually help encourage that fidelity’

i wonder how far those qualities will take her post-menopause. some of them will be irrelevant, if not grotesque. agree about devotion, fidelity and trustworthiness though, as those are timeless.

remember- looks fade; dumb is forever.

your meditation on arrogance made me think. as you may know i have a weight problem (improving though thru low carb diet) and have protested here about the disdain directed at fat people. the injustice of it, since so much of it can be blamed on genes. yet i have disdain for dumb folks. in school i could never understand why they struggled with stuff i found easy to pick up. i thought they just weren’t trying hard enough. but much of their condition is due their genes as well.

so the moral is–we should expect the obese and the not-so-bright to _try_ harder to fight their weaknesses, even if the results only improve them marginally. if they’re at least trying to improve themseves, they don’t deserve the putdowns forever directed at them. just my meandering thoughts…

My brief wasn’t against female intelligence per se. I find smart women hotter than their dumb sisters, all other things equal.

I was speaking more about our irrational worship of intelligence in women. Menopausal women who are smart are not necessarily superior to the menopausal and dumb. What matters is the grace with which she handles her talent or deficiency, as it were. The meek inherit the earth. The proud are laid low. This is especially applicable to the meeker sex.

Just like pretty women who don’t know how pretty they are (through anti-self esteem!), smart women who believe themselves dumb — especially in comparison with men — are the best of all worlds. Humility is the controlling factor.

You ask me to “try to think of it from a woman’s perspective.” Now I ask you to do the same, from our perspective. The intelligence you find attractive in men is not convertible to women. Men simply do not value that particular resourcefulness in the opposite sex. Not only because she is encroaching on our territory, but also because along with that talent comes the much more problematic overestimation of herself. Men would just as soon deal with airheads, as they are simpler to manage.

I can make a cute girl practically wise by browbeating her into submission and accepting the unique strengths of her distaff role. It’s much harder to dominate a woman’s overblown sense of her own self-worth — though not necessarily never worth the challenge. I love to put a self-proclaimed “smart” girl in her place. (So do they.) But you can see why, if they aren’t spectacularly beautiful at the same time, most men will take a pass from the bother.

P.S. You have my word of honor as a gentleman, that I will only instruct your daughter from my knees, in the style of Emile and Sophie. I am not a cad, Lady Carolyn.

Send her pix to my e-mail account (modest ones only, thank you). It would not make you a pimpess! It would make you a true mother, properly understood. A Mrs. Bennet without the post-menopausal schizophrenia brought on by the responsibility of marrying off five maidens in the 19th century. You only have to make the introduction, I will take it from there.

Email closed a low value fat chic’s daughter through an internet blog thread of qualifying your ideas about women and their intelligence relative to yours.

Solid game, queen B.

You always get upset when you’re called out about your game. Your humbled little deluded christian emotions should feel better admitting to yourself you are inexperienced with bedding beautiful women; as opposed to the facade that you imply.

You really should have a web site: Christian singles PUA. You can describe how it’s possible to be skilled in seduction and also be a christian at the same time.

Gives you perspective on the futility of far lesser men attempting to do the same.

Satan is smarter and stronger than all of mankind combined, save One, who reached down to the furthest depths of God-forsakenness, hell itself, to give you a fighting chance. Learn it, love it, live it. Every other way is futile on its face. Your cutesy proto-theological quips will not avail you in the unquenchable fire, which already licks at your shins in this life.

Have a nice day! 🙂

Matt

P.S. The deity is not “an omnipotent being” among other beings. He is Being Itself. Back to the Summa for you.

I am not a fan of the cartoonish belief in saints and demons, but we certainly lost a great deal when we ceased to personify the virtues and temptations. Rendering them abstract is the first step to considering them merely imaginary. So I stand firmly on the side of the superstitious, if only to rehabilitate our conscience. When the intellect fails and you are stripped naked before abject evil? You feel The Enemy in your bones: Lucifer is real. H.P. Lovecraft comes closest to inspiring that primeval knowledge we thought we had done away with through mathematical quantifications and technology.

[H]e was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

This stupid faith in technology über alles has prevented access to the literary foundations of game, such as John Milton’s beautifully rendered fable about the temptations of Eve.

To whom thus Eve, with perfect beauty adorned
My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst
Unargued I obey: So God ordains;
God is thy law, thou mine: To know no more
Is woman’s happiest knowledge, and her praise.

I forget where I saw it, but if you control for education level, smart people have as many kids as dumb people. Basically it’s years of education that predict the decrease in kids. Even at that, it’s probably not the education that does it, but the future-time orientation to get through that much college that does it.

Have we also corrected for corralling co-eds with same age pairings? 27 year old men have it astonishingly easy with college aged women by comparison. Yet these pairing are infrequent during college years. As soon as college ends, the natural age drift begins. I believe co-ed education is the unnatural abomination behind many of our ills.

Looking after a toddler is cognitively severely understimulating but requires constant vigilance. It is the more psychologically taxing the more active mind you have. I would have been bored to death if I had had to take my kid to the playground alone without any adult company. I usually bring a friend of mine along. I can multitask well enough to keep my kid safe while engaging in a conversation with my friend.

Religious elite=oxyMORON. Having invisible friends is a neurological defect. Possibly many/most congresspeople are agnostic/atheist but have to placate the standard issue loonies. When looking at the scientific elite I read that when you get to the higher levels ( National Academy of Sciences members) only then do you get majority avowed atheists.

However, through the principle of regression to the mean, the brilliant and clear thinking will be merged into the Low, by the Voodoo Masses; mooning at the sky like cargo-cult Pacific Islanders, they will with dimwitted glee and faith pump out Additional Retard Babies who slobber through life believing in their Invisible Dad.

Religiosity is beginning to decrease in the USA – but currently the US is as religious as Turkey – something that is very scary to contemplate?!

The thing to remember though is that this country was not founded by Christians – but by agnostics/atheists/deists – and so it’s un-American to be religious. This country owes it’s greatness to those who despised religion, and the beta/collectivist ideas it espouses.

“My time around smart people, and my observations of their discomfort and/or boredom when in the company of children (particularly the men) leads me to believe they don’t really have a strong internal motivator pushing them in the direction of reproduction.”

Being around other children is not even close to being around your own. With your own you feel both a responsibility and a satisfaction for which there is no proxy feeling.

There is a simple explanation and common denominator for low birthrates across the globe: good looking women delay pregnancy because they have other, more fun options. The dysgenic are beauty-based, not iq-based. It’s just that the two overlap a lot.

[heartiste: interesting PA. if beauty, and by extension, slenderness, are the common denominators for low birthrates, then are we looking down the barrel of a future filled with fatasses and cigstaches? *SHUDDER*]

Civilization has subverted evolution. Technology has removed all need to evolve.

The Tardy McDumbstupids breed like cock roaches while gorging themselves on yellow flavored, fatty cheese-foods and without a single natural predator to thin the herd, evolution, instead rewards, weakness, gluttony, a sense of entitlement and an utter lack of foresight.

It wont be the meek who inherit the earth, it wont be the smart or the strong either. It ‘ll be the classless, feckless bovine-eyed fat-tards that become livestock for the Morlocks.

But AFAIK, the higher SES smart people are having more kids than average – I know in my social set having 3 kids is the norm, not the exception.

I think it’s those that are somewhat smart and go to college and incur huge debt – which they can’t now just declare bankruptcy on – and don’t end up with a high paying job, are the most screwed of all. They waste years on college, then more years paying down their debt, and have virtually nothing to show for it all…

You’ll see that access to abortion is the most likely cause of the massive decline in crime in New York City over the last few decades. Basically the criminal element are having fewer children, due to abortion.

Of course ‘tards – like some on this site – can’t acknowledge this causation – due to misplaced moral outrage. So they are to blame for this dysgenic problem!

steve sailer argued that the advent of abortion on demand _increased_ the fraction of births of the less endowed/criminally inclined compared to total births. not everyone will terminate an accidental pregnancy, e.g. the most dysfunctional who may not ever get around to it. not to mention those young women who have nothing going for them and would welcome a child even enduring a reduced quality of life that would be intolerable for most .

but even the lower middle class not absolutely feckless will frogmarch their daughters to an abortion clinic. who’s left? the dregs.

I’m advocating for the Smart Set ( > 130 IQ) to have 3+ children, and advocating abortion for the Criminal Class.

So the non-criminal, working poor and other unfortunates turn to abortion when they don’t plan things out well – but so what. If you can’t plan or are poor then maybe you shouldn’t have kids to begin with?!

Yes, let’s murder even more people so that a handful of yuppies don’t get knocked over their heads and have their frappucinos stolen. I have a better idea: execute all persistent and/or violent criminal elements, including pro-choicers. Problem solved.

Locking criminal up for life and/or having them spend decades in the Courts System cost normal people tens of millions PER PERSON – better to not let that happen, better to not let them be born. Lesser of two evils.

If you don’t understand this or disagree, then I hope you get to live in a criminal infested sewer some time.

If your argument is based on Religion, then you’re a fool.

BTW, I’m Pro-Choice, but would never personally consider having an abortion under almost any circumstances…

Except there is no way to guarantee you are aborting a future criminal with any degree of accuracy, even if I was fine with executing people for crimes they haven’t committed yet. The entire idea is morally repugnant and I see no difference between you and the criminal class.

My argument is based on the idea that innocent people should not be executed. The reasons for holding that idea are religious in my case, but the idea is by no means limited to religious people.

The person doing the aborting is making that decision – not me, you or the state – we are merely supplying the means.

Also, if a person decides to abort – due to whatever reason – and they are subsequently denied the right, do you seriously think they then will raise that child to the best of their abilities, and keep it on the straight and narrow? I don’t…

They are making that decision, and you and others are making the decision to cover for them or outright support them, making you accomplices in the act. The law protects them. If I shoot an abortionist (and I include the woman and/or other parties performing or paying for this service in the definition) I will get thrown in prison. Fuck, if I shoot a criminal I am liable to get thrown in prison, even if it was something like self defense. But these degenerate fucks get to carry out their targeted exterminations with taxpayer dollars paying for the cops, the courts, the prisons and the operation itself.

I agree that there is a problem, but the solution you propose is worse than the problem. If you have to grind up millions of unborn children to stop a far smaller and generally less serious number of crimes we already lost. If you want to go the route of eugenics, mass sterilization would probably work better.

Right now I myself am leaning towards a more ruthless justice system that greatly expands use of the capital punishment as well as a replacement of prison with labor camps. There’s nothing a deadbeat loser fears more than hard work. The greatest poison pill the west swallowed was the fetishization of liberty. Liberty should be a reward for good and honorable people, not a right to be enjoyed by every scumbag on the planet.

The movie Idiocracy offers a good glimpse of the future, but there’s a big hole in the plot: apparently not *everyone* is a total idiot, because someone, somewhere, is producing and marketing the stuff that keeps the idiots content and in check, namely those TV shows, the junk food, the machines, and so forth.

I like to think the hole was deliberate or at least semi-deliberate (Mike Judge knows his trade), because it’s a comedy, and the presence of a Smart Class softly lording over the Idiot Class with a modern, technological version of bread & circuses would’ve been a tad too dystopic and difficult to play for laughs.

And yet, I think that’s how the future will look. The class divide will widen more and more, the rich & smart will tend to separate completely from the poor & stupid, retreating to polite, squeaky-clean havens where they’ll apply their own rules, laws, economy and social mores facilitated by technology.

To the Hoi Polloi they will be de facto invisible, just “the rich”, and thanks to automated machines, copious amount of Brawndo and fine TV fare such as “Ow, my balls!”, they won’t even care that much.

Another big hole in the film Idiocracy was that the screenwriters thought it was “dumb” that society would evolve to the point where prostitution and sluttiness were considered normal and feminism was no longer in existence.

Remember that men in our time are being arrested for soliciting sex for money.

At least in this future scenario, the men of the future were being taken care of sexually while the “smart feminists” are nowhere in sight (bred out of existence along with the SWPLs).

Good riddance. To me the world had smartened up somewhat in this film.

I’m sorry but, if I had been the hero in this story, I wouldn’t have wanted to take the time machine back to the feminist Amerika of 2012 if I had been there.

Now let’s take the ending where Not Sure has become the President of the future world and he’s married Rita from his own time and had the three smartest kids in the world. The camera pans to his vice president who now has 8 wives and 32 kids. And those wives are hot, hot, hot.

The joke is supposed to be that, even now, the dummies are outbreeding the smart ones, even though the smart ones were average IQ in the past.

Obviously the joke failed on me. I wanted some of that and I disagree that polygamy is “dumb” which the (SWPL) screenwriters were clearly trying to say. To me the real dummie was the hero beta who didn’t know that his wife Rita had been a prostitute back in his time period and who was being out-alfa’d by his “dumb” VP.

Idiocracy was very entertaining and it did get the point across that policies need to be created that encourage the smarter people to breed in today’s world.

The bottom line is that Idiocracy ultimately supported the status quo of the feminists on the left and right trying to tell men how to live their lives. And it started by lamenting the existence of an alpha male reproducing while simultaneously lamenting how a beta married male of a supposed high IQ had failed to reproduce. It was funny but it had a flawed premise. Alpha males, by definition, deserve to reproduce. The meek SWPL male at the beginning deserved to see his line end.

The understanding of global fertility is a little more sophisticated than one clip from a Mike Judge movie. Just like Beavis and Butthead aren’t the last word on friendship and adolescence either.

You dimwits who cite Idiocracy as some kind of definitive (or even plausible) theory need to STFU. You can’t even understand the citations of Heartiste’s post — which refute the simple Idiocracy line — much less a complex field like demographics.

“apparently not *everyone* is a total idiot, because someone, somewhere, is producing and marketing the stuff that keeps the idiots content and in check, namely those TV shows, the junk food, the machines, and so forth. ”

Actually it is addressed, AI programs do that. Are you really saying you can’t imagine machines doing marketing?

With the magic of google search and self-driving cars at your fingers I’d consider that question very seriously.

“And yet, I think that’s how the future will look. The class divide will widen more and more, the rich & smart will tend to separate completely from the poor & stupid, retreating to polite, squeaky-clean havens where they’ll apply their own rules, laws, economy and social mores facilitated by technology. ”

Upper class women are not reproducing. Where is this smart class supposed to come from?

Actually it is addressed, AI programs do that. Are you really saying you can’t imagine machines doing marketing?

I don’t remember AIs mentioned once in the movie, but it’s been a while. Can you point me to the scene as to jog my memory?

There’s certainly a structure to marketing, but also a good deal of creativity, I assume you would need a pretty advanced and somewhat sentient AI to conceive a decent campaign. I however doubt that the Idiot Class would be used to extract wealth in the form of money, but mostly in the form of labor – either hard labor, uncreative labor or military service.

It also depends on the definition of AI. John McCarthy (1971 Turing Award for AI research) averred that a thermostat could be “intelligent” and even have “beliefs”, but not meta-cognition, namely beliefs about beliefs and all that.

So AIs, as things stood and stand, cannot really operate much outside their original programming regardless of how “intelligent” (scare quotes because in this context the commonly accepted definition crumbles a bit) they become. You’ll still need humans maintaining them AND a (very tangible and very real) hardware infrastructure on which they operate. Certainly not a job for low-IQ morons.

(which begs the question: if we’re dichotomizing society into Smart/Idiots, and the Idiots cannot do maintenance on account of being constitutionally incapable, what will motivate the Smart Class to build and maintain the infrastructure? Fear? Will be seen as some sort of community service? Pure joy of tinkering, like maintaining an open source project? Will there be a “Buffer Class” or smart-but-not-smart-enough people?)

A more realistic scenario would be a combination of AI and human intervention. If the hypothetical world inhabited by the hypothetical Idiot Class is full of screens and scanning machines and bar-codes and Orwellian surveillance, and everything is connected to a central network, then AI programs can be used to quickly assess the trends of the population, and the Smart Class can quickly cobble together cheap entertainment and faux-innovations (SUPER….EXTREME BRAWNDO! Now with 200% more electrolytes!) giving the Idiots the illusion of novelty.

(Isn’t this already happening?)

Upper class women are not reproducing. Where is this smart class supposed to come from?

That’s an exaggeration for the sake of argument. Their reproduction rate is not 0%. It’s just slightly below replacement rates, so the numbers may be dwindling, but it’s not like they’re barreling toward extinction. They’re also starting to realize this, so the trend might as well slow down or even reverse itself.

I can envision two not-mutually-exclusive possibilities: artificial reproduction combined with surrogate and/or artificial uteri and upward mobility. We all know how artificial reproduction works. How upward mobility will work in that scenario… hmm.

I assume that the Idiots will still have schools, and if grades and behaviors and attitudes are recorded in a database, perhaps there will be some mechanism in place to single out and keep tabs on the high-IQ kids who will inevitably crop up once in a while even among the idiot-spawn, and groom them in some way, partly for replacement, and partly to remove potentially subversive leaders. Perhaps to form the aforementioned “Buffer Class” if they are smart, but not smart enough.

Every man’s goal in life should be to have a son someday and to try his best to have that son be more successful than he was. A proper Alpha son leaves a legacy of one’s genetics, one’s name, one’s wealth, and one’s upbringing. Men striving to leave their legacy through a proper Alpha male son has been an ingredient to human progress throughout all of history. To not do so means you have failed at the purpose of life. (Succesful) men losing the drive to reproduce (actual reproduction, not just sex) will be disastrous for society and for human progress.

Assuming you’re not being tongue and cheek, the story certainly is not that clear cut. Levitt’s theory has some major problems, first among them timing of the drop in crime rates as they relate to the cohorts born after Roe v Wade.

The (potential) problem with open access abortion is that it requires some level of forward thinking to realize just how drastically having a child changes a person’s life, so it’s not the people at the bottom who end up taking advantage of easy abortion, but the people in the lower-middle and middle who do. I’d suspect easy abortion guts the middle more than it does either tail.

“Being around other children is not even close to being around your own. With your own you feel both a responsibility and a satisfaction for which there is no proxy feeling.”

This ABSOLUTELY correct. There is no similarity at all between a man’s feeling for his own kids and any feelings toward children generally. When you have your first kid it is like some powerful machinery deeply buried in your head that you didn’t know you had suddenly turned on with a building-shaking rumble. You love your children without cognition or words or warm feelings, it is a new state of existence. You love them with an animal intensity that has to be lived to be understood. It is far below the level of conscious thought, it is more at the level of hunger for food or lust or needing to breathe. A threat to yourself you can assess cooly, a threat to your kids and even the most ordinarily mild mannered father would without an instant’s hesitation kill the source of the threat with a rock, steak knife or whatever is at hand, and stomp on the guy’s head to smash his skull to make sure he was dead. Your protective instincts come online with blinding speed. You will without any thought do absolutely anything to remove a child from danger, instinctively. You become acutely aware of anything in the environs that could be hazard to the kid. And the joy that they give you, especially when they are good or achieve something or seem to be turning out well, is far beyond what words can express. And if you are blessed to have them reach teen years and you see them becoming people you like and respect, it is better than every material satisfaction there is.

I have been continually surprised as a father about how this all works. I had no idea it would be like this. We are build to fuck, yes. But if we give ourselves over to being fathers, we find that we are built for that too.

Even more interesting, women are built to be mothers, but what they do and how they feel is radically different, but I will stop because this comment is too long already. There is no such thing as “parenting” — a word that is yet another pretty lie that should be repudiated.

[b]if beauty, and by extension, slenderness, are the common denominators for low birthrates[/b]…*snip*

Surely you jest. At most, we can probably guess that higher IQ women have the drive to keep themselves in shape after kids and/or as they age, but I see nothing to indicate dumb women aren’t as hot, on average, during peak fertility years, if not even hotter, on average, and with a greater number of hotties per capita. Just because some Trailer Trash Tammie looks like she 60 at 30 after 5 kids and a two-pack-a-day habit doesn’t mean she wasn’t bangin’ at 18.

Our intelligence is of a rather low grade variety meant for simple comparisons and categorization fitting for hunter gatherer tasks. Our biases are only removed with repeated and immediate punishment and rewards. Our best means of survival is currently embarrassed and will at some point reach an inflection point and be replaced…till the meteor. We are unfit to survive as we are.

To enjoy children, you have to know how to communicate emotions and not just thoughts. The ability to do this is heavily influenced by class – in fact it might even be the chief determinant. This is why women have historically liked kids more than men, the global south more than the cold and stern north, and the educated class less than the animal wage laborers. It only makes sense.

I’m not wild about other people’s kids. Sure, I like some of them alright, but that’s about it. It’s totally different with my own.

From the moment I got the positive pregnancy test result and knew there was a baby growing inside my body, I loved them. The feeling intensified when I could feel the baby moving. With both pregnancies, I willingly underwent bed rest and godawful medical procedures to halt preterm labor, because I loved the child and wanted her, and for the second pregnancy him, to make it into this world as close to full term and as healthy as possible.

There’s no adequate way to describe the outpouring of love I felt when my children were born. They’re worth every long hour spent walking and singing to a colicky baby, every sleepless night rocking a sick child, and all the extra work that children bring. They bring more joy than worry, and more love than work. I wouldn’t ever go back to life without my children, even if I could. They’re worth everything. I’d die for them if it ever became necessary.

Yes, women are made to be mothers. Some women are defective and don’t make good mothers. For the rest of us, motherhood is an incredible completion, an ultimate meaning in a meaningless world.

The technology is increasing in ways that smart and ruthless people willing to disregard the ideas of democracy should be able to head off Idiocracy if they are so motivated. Whats preventing this are post WW2 cultural changes especially vis a vis eugenics and complacency.

Both those conditions can be altered and with a combination of carrot and stick. the stupid kept from breeding in numbers.

The problem is of course this necessitates a smaller population, a much smaller population and getting the 120+ crowd (the talented 1/4 say) to have enough kids is challenging.

No society can thrive with indefinite population shrinkage, smart or not, capitalist or not.

Also the governing class, many of whom do qualify would freak. Beyond the moral questions comes one of status. If you have mostly equals its harder to maintain status. Every powerful man is a would be king and desires serfs.

This status drive is also why IMO most rich people make decisions that harm others. after you reach a certain point, the only way you can get that rush from success is for other people to suffer.

Stepping over say a homeless person makes a wealthy or powerful feel the rush again and thus baring overwhelming fear, they always choose the selfish path.

This certainly includes issues of eugenics and immigration which properly applied (high eugenics, low immigration) would grossly increase competition for smart billets and reduce the pleasure rush. This is roughly like trying to take away someones crack and will be resisted

Bullshit. Most wealthy (and/or high-income, trust me, I know enough people who make seven figures) people quite simply do not have the time to care about making others suffer. Mainly they care about growing their power/wealth. Or enjoying theirs, but again, usually not by acting sadistic.

I hear the conversation in these terms from 99%ers a lot, but not as much from people who actually know the rich, as you may. Granted, I know few wall street bankers, but the wealthy I do know (I stopped skirting around the fact that I know a lot a few years ago) are genuinely compassionate people, do evil as a byproduct of work that is completely detached from ground level consequences, and do good in other ways in other parts of their life.

Those in intelligence or defense contracting recognize that human suffering is necessary for political stability and see that as a greater good. Those that are involved in land development sit on the boards of orphanages and donate vast amounts of money. Those in politics work towards the greater good they believe in while accepting the corruption necessary to achieving it.

Can you tell I grew up in a wealthy suburb of dc? Maybe it is different elsewhere, but despite having the shittiest people in America, the Washingtonian wealthy frequently bring a sense of duty to the table that differs radically from their mid-level counterparts.

I dunno. I’ve wanted a stable marriage and kids for at least the last ten years, but as a nerdy Asian male in the US, I couldn’t find a suitable partner unless I committed to feigning a different personality for the rest of my life. (I’ve since moved to East Asia; things are looking much better here.)

“The real reason for the dysgenic trend is that smart people just don’t get as much enjoyment out of kids as dumber people do. As a result, they use the contraceptive tech and cultural memes at their disposal to actively avoid the burden of children […]”

True for me.

To be entirely honest, I do enjoy kids, and for some reason they like me back in a cool-uncle way, but not all of them and not in every situation. I can’t relate to pre-verbal babies, at least when they’re not mine, and when they hit puberty they are an emotional mess. And I can’t stand whiny, spoiled, screechy, dumb kids regardless of age.

That’s not the main point, though. I assume I’d love my own kids no matter what. I just don’t want a kid because of the mother, to be honest. I just don’t trust women enough, and mothers even less, since children are the most powerful weapon they possess, and are not afraid to use it, since they live in a society that allows and often encourages them to do so.

We all know very well how a lovely, sweet lady can morph into a screeching gorgon literally overnight for no discernible reason. The thought that I could have my child spirited away, my finances ruined and my entire life wrecked in days, with very little recourse, is just too real and too tangible. Being schooled in game is no guarantee. The stakes are just too high.

One of the hallmarks of intelligence is vision, being able to think long-term and to assess risks. I bet a lot of smart people, mostly men in this case, just look around them, take heed of what’s happening to other guys, crunch the numbers, realize that in today’s world there’s no shortage of ways to feel fulfilled with little consequences, and say “Uuuh… how about you keep breeding and I invent time travel while playing Halo?”

You should wait until you are 40+, have your finances in order, put your money where an ex can’t get them, marry a suitable woman of younger age, and have a family and children. It can be very happy. But, proceed with caution, trusting nothing to luck.

BTW, reading the newspaper too much can make you very pessimistic. The internet is even worse in this regard. Real life is not quite so bad.

You should wait until you are 40+, have your finances in order […] But, proceed with caution, trusting nothing to luck.

Oh, I agree. One problem of this approach is, however, that when you’re a financially-stable middle-aged man one single misstep could ruin your whole life potentially forever. It’s manageable to bounce back when you are in your twenties or early thirties. You can always change jobs, career, learn new skills, even leave the country and start anew. Not that you can’t do those things at 40, but it’s undeniably more difficult.

Prenups are often a joke, and every major purchase you make is traceable back to you, and major finagling such as offshore trusts and stashing physical, easily transportable hard assets like gold and jewels makes sense but borders on paranoia.

BTW, reading the newspaper too much can make you very pessimistic. The internet is even worse in this regard. Real life is not quite so bad.

Of course. It’s only that my own observations seem to confirm what the media say. I could chalk it up to a form of selective attention, meaning that I’ve already reached the conclusion and I’m simply looking for evidence to support it ignoring everything else, but doesn’t seem to be the case.

I have not ever felt the urge for children of my own and every time I hear the screeching of one I am joyfully reminded that I made the correct choice. The situation we currently have in the UK where illegitimate children equals free housing, and income without work has led to increased breeding among the lower orders. Many say that this okay because we will need the plebs in the future to do all the shit jobs, my contention with this is that most of the benefit generation children will turn out to be feckless scroungers just like their parents.

Smarter people just have a general propensity to have quality children vs quantity. When you have bad production it’s just more likely you’ll have a good egg with a whole basket. Good gene people shouldn’t have an accidental bad egg because it would consume too much of their time/resources. Create quality eggs to maximize your potential, so it would make sense to create a defense mechanism to be picky and only have kids with an equal or better gene pairing. But then again if you can have kids without any time/resources(other person raising the kid) then spray away and create a basket.

There’s smart and there’s… smart. The latter would see immediately that any guy debased enough to agree to use a “rubber” no longer has any claim to manhood. Even if Aids did exist, even if STDs in general weren’t a blatant myth – hell, even if he’s got a morbid phobia of kids, there’s the pure self-degredation of acquiescing bitch-style to put a piece of poison-soaked industrial waste onto his exposed pride and joy at an intimate moment. His very essence of authority, sheathed so he can’t even feel it, let alone her. What humiliation! What a shitty lay – like a microwaved carrot in lieu of steak tartare. And how many encounters have ended prematurely because of a fumbled encounter with these diabolic little pieces of shit? Pathetic.
Rather than taking his sexual due as a man and filling his sensual appetite, he kneels and self-flagellates to the gods of reuters and big-genocide-pharma, who have only ever told lies and treated him with contempt. Fuck the golden calf – idolatry never got this dumb before.
It’s black humour – and it does conform to natural law. To agree to this intrusion is indeed such an insult to his own very existence (and to the woman he’s with, if he cares) that he really doesn’t deserve to pass on his seed anyway. Such a fellow might as well just jump off a high building, but would doubtless lack the courage.
This leads to the obvious question… is it really true that the “smart” are being bred out of existence in this way?
Or are the Western middle classes now the most docile, gullible, degenerate group in recorded history, due soon to be a well-deserved unlamented footnote to same?

I rather disagree that intelligence equates to disinterest in children. My IQ is 130+, I have twin daughters and I enjoy being around kids. It isn’t a pervy thing; I get bored very easily and find that children adequately meet my need for constant activity.

I also know (from experience) that, if you can drop your alpha on a girl before she hits puberty, when she turns 18, you can pretty much tap it at will. Little girls remember those crushes that they had in elementary school… and there are few things as satisfying as snagging the virginity of girl who’d been holding out for the first alpha who she actively engaged with even though it had never been sexual.

Dumb ppl have more kids also because they need to be entertained by something external. Smart ppl are always more self-sufficient. Thats why they also have kids for different reasons. Smart couples tend to make the kid their project and support its independence while dumb ppl make a kid solely for their own pleasure. Smart parents also talk to their kids more. Dumb ppl also are more likely to have pets, whihc could imply they are not even so picky about what gives the “social satisfaction” they seek.

wanted to add my 2 cents. family party this past weekend and my cousin’s daughters were there, 5 and 2. both future attention whores but overflowing with personality and fun to be around. had a lot of fun playing with them in short bursts but adults are better company.

today an annoying kid was paying too much attention to my dog at the park. i wanted the bitch to lay down so i could play bball but the little bastard wouldn’t leave her alone. asked too many questions and wouldn’t shut the hell up and go away.

to summarize, i don’t really like kids but will give them a semi-pass if they’ve got personality and aren’t annoying.

“Lie number four. The culture does not create innate sex predilections; it reflects and amplifies them. Sex differences are real, hard-wired, and exist from the moment of birth. You do boys no service by telling them their preferences are pathological and forcing them into learning tracks that turn them away from their natures.”

Listen, although – undeniably – you make some good points… you’re really going to try to rebut the marketing industry? The “does art reflect life” or vice versa question is so controversial. Not a fan of how you argued that one. Regardless of the chicken or the egg issue (although it’s quite obvious you’d never be a fan of Wilde – which I find odd), marketing still perpetuates certain modes of thinking. You really can’t deny that either. To pull out my big dusty book of feminist drivel: I believe they call it “hyper-masculinity”, and to some extent it does exist. Just don’t understand why you complain. If all men become more “beta” then aren’t you guys the small percent of the population that “make women happy”? Consider it a monopoly on the love-making world. You’d have my support.

[heartiste: there isn’t a single marketing guru in the world who can successfully convince the majority of straight men to find fat women sexually attractive. there are limits to the effects of propaganda; specifically, the most effective advertising and marketing psy ops are those which heed inborn human nature.]

“you feminists”?
Just need to be clear here.. I tried the whole feminist thing for a year and converted back to sanity.

And again, not sure why this is such a bad thing? Isn’t this feminist movement what will separate men from boys by the opinions of the chateau? You guys will have a sea of women to choose from. If anything I’d encourage this movement.

It’s a deep and peculiar subject. Certainly the idea of dysgenics has been around for a long time, and seems eminently reasonable to everyone. (E.g., “The Marching Morons” by Kornbluth.) But the average measured IQ in every nation is *increasing*, it’s called the “Flynn effect” and has a Wikipedia page. That increase may or may not be significant, but it suggests that the dysgenic effect is less than everyone expects it to be.

One factor which I’ve never seen assessed is the effect of widespread adultery. It’s known that 5 to 10 percent of people don’t have the fathers that they are believed to have (even among children of married couples). Presumably the actual fathers are heavily weighted toward alpha bad-boys, and it’s likely that they are weighted toward people who are successful (according to the standards of the various subcultures they live in).

This could cause a striking eugenic effect, and could render all the statistics for “who has the most children” meaningless — for men. It would not have a direct effect for women, but alpha women tend to have more sons than daughters, and a alpha woman with a few very alpha sons (who in turn impregnate lots of wives of beta men) would be quite evolutionarily successful, possibly more than an alpha woman who divides her resources among a larger number of sons.

This could be investigated if DNA sequencing becomes cheap enough that we can sequence the DNA of lots of people, and reconstruct enough real genealogies to get accurate measurements of the distribution of fatherhood across the male sex. The truth would probably be brain-searing (once again).

I wanted kids because I enjoy the experience. Playing video games with them is great. Seeing them lay people out on Friday night is also fun. Finally having someone you can have a honest conversation with? Priceless.

Speaking only of my personal experience, smart and “likes kids” may be correlated, but don’t appear to be causal.

I’m fairly smart, and so are my friends. They’ve all got a JD, MD or PhD from good schools, and so do I. I’m “the dumb one” with a professionally measured IQ 140. And some of them love kids and have several while others are single and want nothing to do with children.

I’m not sure what personality traits exactly lend a person to larger families. Obviously a female partner that is willing to do “kids now, career later” is key. But that can result from clear priorities a much as living in the moment.

It’s all sort of moot though. Within 20 years (maybe less) we will be able to affirmatively select for genetic traits, and even “upgrade” a fetus. GATTACA with “the genius patch” at reasonable prices. Once that happens not even Darwin can say where the species will go.